chinese


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	Speaking Chinese.

Since early in 2000, I’ve been involved in a major project based in Shanghai, Peoples Republic of China. As an example to the other Westerners who are working with me in Shanghai and as a mark of repect to all of my good friends in China, I decided to learn the language. These are my notes from the course I took in Putonghua, or Mandarin Chinese. They helped me a lot, so I figured they could help others too. Now if everyone who ever took a course would publish their notes on the Internet..........

The sections get progressively more difficult. Each section has its own vocabulary along with examples of each word’s use in specific sentences. Click on any pinyin rendition of a Chinese sentence to hear how it would be spoken by a Chinese national.

Grammar Summary

The Chinese Language

Many people in the West think that the Chinese language is Cantonese, whereas in fact Cantonese is just one of the eight major dialects of the Chinese language. These dialects differ immensely in pronunciation, but share the same written form. The Northern dialect is spoken by around 70% of the Chinese population and the “standard” pronunciation used on television and radio is based on this dialect. This is called putonghua or common speech. In the West it is mistakenly called “Mandarin”. This course deals with putonghua.

Grammar.

After 4,000 years of use, Chinese grammar is still not completely understood. However, there are a few examples of how Chinese grammar differs from Western languages:

Nouns in Chinese are neither singular nor plural. - ‘One book’ or ‘Three book’.

Because of the above, verbs have only one form – ‘I go China’, ‘They go China’, etc.

Verbs by themselves do not indicate tense. In order to precisely indicate a tense, particles or other ‘grammar words’ are used with a verb. - ‘I yesterday go Shanghai’.

Prepositions are not used before time phrases – ‘I Friday arrive’.

The largest unit, be it time or place, always comes first – ‘I from China Xi’an come’, ‘They March 14^th arrive’.

Qualifiers or ‘measure words’ are used between a number and a noun. Different measure words are used with different nouns or different classes of nouns. – ‘two ben book’ or ‘two ge people’.

Tones

Chinese is a tone language. In putonghua there are four tones, five if you include the neutral tone. Since there are only about 400 basic monosyllables which can be combined to make words in Chinese, the use of tones is one way to increase the number of monosyllables. Every syllable in isolation has its definite tone. Syllables with different tones may mean things although they share they same pinyin letters. The failure to use the correct tone is one subject that often gets Westerners into trouble in China. For example, ma pronounced with the first tone means ‘mother’ while ma pronounced with the third tone means ‘horse’.

All the pinyin words in this document have “tone” markers to be pronounced when spoken. The tone markers are as follows:

First Tone - high and level - ā

Second Tone - rising - á

Third Tone - falling and rising - ă

Fourth Tone - falling - à